Delegates attending Captivating Criminality 3 next month may be interested in an event taking place the day before the conference starts, the details of which can be found below.

Creative and autobiographical writing have existed in the modern prison since as early as Oscar Wilde’s penning of De Profundis and contemporary literature has more than a few shelves given over to the ‘nick lit’ of a more recent prison population.

The value of writing in prison is supported by a number of prisoners who have become professional writers and a number of professional writers who have facilitated prisoners’ creativity. This anecdotal evidence, however, is often lost in academic research that aims to evaluate the impact of the arts through ‘scientific’ measurement.

This day of workshops and discussions aims to bring together an array of academics from the humanities, social sciences and the arts, with criminal justice professionals and some of the most experienced prison writing practitioners in the UK, in a bid to move beyond the binary of reconviction studies and unearth the foundations of an alternative, writer-led approach to prison arts research.

Sessions will include:

The Art of Psychopathy - an exploration of the fact and fiction of the mentally disordered offender.

The Art of Empathy - the relational dimensions of creative arts in prisons.

The Art of Release - how probation might inform art and art, probation.